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the truth that the great instrument of man's improvement 
was the introduction of ideas and convictions into his reason, 
and the steady contemplation of them ; Christianity at once 
produced the perfect antitype of philosophic speculation, the 
embodiment of all that is holy in human form, and exhibited 
it with power, not only to the contemplation of the elect, but 
to the masses of mankind. The philosophers speculated; the 
authors of Christianity acted. What the one sighed after the 
other realized. The one evolved perfect constitutions for 
states in his study ; the other created a church, which has left 
its impress everywhere on the pages of human history, and 
will do the same in ages yet to come. Philosophy recognizes 
that Christianity has embodied in her teaching all the truths 
which she had succeeded in discovering, and penetrated 
beyond her into her innermost temple. To that which ancient 
philosophy could not attain, but which Christianity has 
since discovered, the whole current of modern thought has 
affixed the seal of its approbation. I ask to what does this 
testimony point? We have but two alternatives before 
us. Christianity has either been evolved by forces purely 
human, or it has come down from Heaven. Modern unbelief 
is outwardly respectful. It has long ceased to assign 
conscious deception as its origin. Modern unbelievers only 
invoke the aid of a few acts of untruthfulness when they 
are positively compelled to do so by the necessities of 
the position which they have assumed. The authors of 
Christianity, as they tell us, were good and holy men, who 
only occasionally invoked the aid of conscious falsehood. 
While they are compelled to pronounce large portions of 
Christianity fabulous, those who created the mythic stories of 
which it is composed were deceived and not deceivers. While 
its authors possessed the loftiest of moral ideals, and have 
displayed genius of the highest order, they were yet unable 
to decide between the creations of their own minds and the 
realities without. Notwithstanding the high ideal of their 
moral character, and the profundity of that genius which has 
invented Christianity, there is no conceivable amount of 
credulity or superstition with which they are not chargeable. 
How, then, did they work ? Like as in this phyiscal 
universe, if we can believe the dogmas of certain men who 
claim to themselves the monopoly of the name of philosophers, 
the forces of nature acting through infinite time have pro- 
duced the divine Kosmos of the universe, so the forces of the 
moral world, acting in entire unconsciousness during a brief 
period of time, the limits of which can be clearly defined, have 
elaborated not only the entire moral teaching of Christianity, 
